Entirely without class

I noticed an interesting link on the NPSC blog the other day. Danah Boyd has written an essay on ‘class divisions’ in America, as represented by the movement of kids between MySpace and Facebook.

As I read it, Danah indicates that with the opening of Facebook to teens (it had previously been for university students) there has been a generalised split in the types of youth using these social media sites. Apparently, kids who were likely to attend university had migrated to Facebook, while other kids had stayed with MySpace. What Danah sees is a split in what can only really be called “class”.

When you start using words like class you’re destined for trouble. Part of the problem being that class traditionally applies to placed like Victorian Great Britain, with the strong imposition of roles, social station and the like. You also run smack-bang into Marxists and their detractors, because class is such a fundamental premise of the great red ideology.

The way Danah wants to use the word is interesting though, because it is supposed to indicate a particular social division within American national society. And it does indicate the kind of natural split that occurs in our society too. Education is a very real social marker. Although education is available to anyone in New Zealand, like the USA it becomes an important piece of social capital a person can exploit for personal gain. Having a degree, or a higher degree, can automatically make you eligible for particular types of jobs. And presumably high-paying jobs.

So right there you have a type of social division, between those who qualify for some jobs, and those who don’t. Hardly controversial. After all, education is voluntary and reasonably priced, which means anyone can access it.

What is controversial is that idea that there exist strata without our small, egalitarian society who are predisposed to acquiring this type of social capital. What I mean is that some people are brought up with the expectation that they will go to university and get a education. Others are not. So what you have right there is a social split, one that reinforces itself through pay rates and, dare I say it, social status.

Now, back on Public Address I talked about the split I’d observed between ‘operational’ and ‘policy’ roles in the public service. While I received some odd reactions to the idea, I noticed that these tended to be from people on the policy side who did not consider themselves to hold themselves up as in any way superior to operational people.

Oh, for those of you who haven’t had the good fortune to work in the public service, ‘operational’ roles are the coal-face, systems and services-type roles. Things like manning the phones or dealing with the public face to face. Policy roles are generally focused on Parliament, public relations and communciations.

Now, while policy people don’t see themselves as superior, operational people tend to see policy people as thinking they’re superior. It’s probably just an issue of perception, and hardly unique to the public service. You see the same kind of attitude from chefs and kitchen staff towards “front bunnies”, the waiters/barista’s etc. Some roles within workplaces carry more apparent importance than others.

From what I gathered in Danah’s paper, the MySpace crowd view the FaceBook crowd the way operations does policy. Policy, with their “flashy degrees’, and consequent “flashy salaries”. It’s a really interesting dynamic, if not only because the jobs and education are also reflected in where people live, the kinds of recreation they enjoy, and the kinds of thinsg they consume.

So although it’s not a structured system, no-one is trapped in operations, and policy is not god-ordained, there does exist a self-reinforcing “class”-type division that echoes out to broader social structures. And what’s so fascinating about it is the way in which it operates naturally. Some people gravitate towards operations-type jobs, and others to policy.

In a way, the social division exists to make people more comfortable with who they are, and who they associate with. And I suppose that as long as it doesn’t become entrenched, then it’s not really an issue to go waving arms about. Fascinating all the same though.

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10 Responses to “Entirely without class”

I’ll take my chances with being labelled like that. Got labelled a ‘Green Trotskyite’ when I attend the National Union of Students conference one year. Took it as a great compliment, since it meant I was stirring up trouble (again).

yeah, it’s an extremely tricky area. you can’t ramble on about class without looking like a commie, but you can’t describe the difference between bogan and kings college ‘sects’ without using the word class.

PS John Major’s attempts to create the ‘classless society’ in the UK (he was the son of variety entertainers who worked on the buses before rising to be PM) just resulted in universal crass consumerism and a pretence that class doesn’t exist any more, as far as I can see. Not that I’ve done a great deal of thinking on the subject.

In the UK the bright young graduates who get selected for the ‘Fast Stream’ – the accelerated promotion scheme not open to all graduates – are now required to spend some time in an operations role as well as policy roles. This change in the design of the scheme was explicitly designed to break down the divide between policy and operations and to focus people’s minds on designing policies that can actually be delivered rather than simply looking good in theory.

However, I also found that entering the civil service at a middling-senior level on secondment was difficult because the institution presumes so much tacit knowledge of its systems. That’s where it can be difficult to get people from a non-government background with experience of operations to fit into the civil service policy-making environment. Maybe they’ve made improvements to practices by now, but I wouldn’t hold my breath…

From what I read here (and i’ll admit while I’ve read a lot about Danah’s* essay, I’ve not read the thing itself) I think it’s an interesting construct of “class”. I use the “” because usually the word that follows is “system”. but no ones talking system, hence “class” becomes “classification”. Groups of people become subspecies instead with clear evolutionary paths:

kids who were likely to attend university had migrated to Facebook, while other kids had stayed with MySpace

Perhaps the most interesting thing I’ve noticed (and I agree with your public service assessment Che) is that work-based classes tend to be driven from the bottom up. The operations people percieve a structure and the policy people fall into that (though where does that put the researchers?)

*Note also Danah seems to have welcomed the use of capital letters again.

chris, i was also perplexed. it’s probably a natural aversion, class-based analysis being as fraught as it is. it opens you to accusations of being a ‘commie’ or ‘pinko’ for one.

but deborah’s comment kind of reinforces that aversion. i am in policy. but, while there ae very real rationale for the policy-operations split, the types of persons who take the jobs on either side is marked.

kiwis hate to think that he have any kind of totem-pole effect in our society. but, you cna always defeat this aversion with the magic word.

bogans.

one’s attitude towards that group of people is pretty telling.

and “manning” was a ex-girlfriend of mine from the mount. “tracey manning”, bogan. probably doing hairdressing somewhere as we speak.

Part of the reason for separation between policy and operational sides of an organisation, is that policy must not be driven by operations, although equally, it can’t be sensibly formed without understanding operational constraints.

But your analysis (policy wonk in the making, perhaps?) makes sense to me, especially with respect to people making sense of themselves through the communties they self-select into.

I was surprised how twitchy Danah was about calling something “class”. If a (somewhat) entrenched social system based on income, geography, education and expectations isn’t class… what is it? Perhaps I’m less worried about Marxist repercussions than she is.